


Triptych: Life, Death, Rebirth

by ItsThatGuy



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: (unless i get contradicted by Alecto), Blood, Canon Compliant, Combat, Gen, Imperialistic Violence, POV Injury, Pre-Canon, Unrealistic Tactics, but canon makes no sense to begin with on that score so w/e, warfare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:02:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29412342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ItsThatGuy/pseuds/ItsThatGuy
Summary: I was nineteen the year that the empire of death came for my planet.
Kudos: 5





	Triptych: Life, Death, Rebirth

_ I: I was nineteen the year that the empire of death came for my planet. _

It wasn’t the first I’d heard of them, of course. We’d all grown up with the stories: the empire of death that had risen from the grave of humanity’s homeworld, that had been slowly rolling across the stars like a blight for nearly ten thousand years. But that’s all they were to us--stories.

My family lived on a farming commune a little ways outside the city. It was an idyllic place to grow up, the stuff of memories of long summer days spent running and laughing with the other children in green fields. As I grew older, I began to help one of my mothers with tending the crops, planting and harvest and so on. Our people had lived on this planet for a long time, time enough to figure out techniques and invent machines to help us; the work was just hard enough to be satisfying. In between, we’d pass the time with stories, told amongst ourselves or taken from the entertainment holos. A not insignificant number of these told of the empire of death, although in them there was always a stalwart hero to stand against them and ultimately foil their schemes of universal domination. Even so, those stories always made the adults go quiet for a little while afterwards.

The night everything changed, we had all gathered together in the dining hall for the evening meal as we normally did. My uncle was late; he appeared in the middle of the meal, ashen-faced, walking like a man in a dream. My other mother was the first to notice and ask him what was wrong.

_ They’re coming, _ he said.

The Hainish system--our neighbors, by the extremely loose interstellar definition of ‘neighbor’--had just fallen. We had, by the best reckoning, about a week before the empire of death was upon us next.

After that meal, for the first time that I could remember, the bulk of the food remained on the table, uneaten. Suddenly, nobody was very hungry.

- - -

_II:_ _We mounted our defense with everything we could scrape together._

We knew that they’d come for the spaceport. It was the beating heart of our planet; whoever controlled it effectively had a stranglehold on inbound and outbound ships.

Our militia had been created for skirmishes and minor disputes, with nowhere near the numbers required to fight off a full-blown invasion force. There was no conscription--it wasn’t our way--but many of us volunteered as auxiliaries anyway. It wasn’t nearly enough to make up the difference, but we could pretend, and hope.

The main terminal was the empire of death’s likeliest choice of beachhead, the only part of the spaceport large enough for them to fully bring their numbers to bear against us. We drew battle lines, sorted ourselves into fighting squads protecting the entries to hallways that led to smaller, more vital areas. When at last word came down the line that the invasion force had arrived and launched its attack, I took up my gun and took up a position with my squad, waiting for the last scant moments of peace to shatter. We didn’t have to wait long.

Assault pods impacted against the outer wall of the main terminal, grasping metal claws tearing through them, ringed charges blowing massive holes to clear the way. The pods’ leering metal mouths that snapped open to disgorge soldiers, clad in uniforms so white as to be nearly blinding to look at and edged in deep blue, carrying the massive two-handed swords of heavy infantry. Their battle cry carried even over the noise as our gun line opened fire and began to cut them down.

_ Fidelity, fidelity! _ they howled.

Fidelity to what? I found myself wondering even as I reloaded. What could a death cultist possibly believe in so strongly?

Swarming through the gunfire, they crashed down on our front line, who pushed back, fending the assault off with the best melee kit we could come up with--what shields or shield-like objects were available, paired with machetes and a variety of improvised bludgeons. For a few bloody moments that could’ve been hours, the two lines pressed together, the force and the object, waiting to see which was unstoppable or immovable… and then, slowly at first, the white-clad attackers began to falter, starting as an uncertain, uncoordinated stumbling backward, then turning into a full-fledged fighting retreat. My heart leapt as our forces pressed forward after them, stepping over the bloodied bodies littering the floor, refusing our assailants the opportunity to regroup…

A foolish mistake.

White fire seared my eyes, and a series of resounding blasts rattled my eardrums. When my senses returned, I saw our front line, suddenly reduced to a fraction of itself, crumbling beneath the resurgent assault of our assailants. The muzzle of my gun drooped as I struggled to comprehend this sudden reversal in fortune. I’d heard rumors that the empire of death possessed profane arts that could cause a corpse to explode like a bomb, but to actually see them at work…

Somebody, nearby, was shouting to be heard over the din. It was my squad leader.  _ Fall back! _ she was calling.  _ Fall back! _

Clumsy and disorganized, our squad began to obey the order in fits and starts, falling back to our secondary position--or  _ positions, _ rather, a series of last-ditch holdouts at various chokepoints amongst the corridors leading deeper into the facility. Thoughtlessly, I glanced back at the action, and found myself transfixed by what I saw.

Blood--splashed across the battlefield in vast quantities--was rising, seemingly of its own volition, from where it had been splattered, streaming into long, thin tendrils that lashed at the shattered remnants of our first defense. Where it struck, it cut like a blade, sending soldiers tumbling to the ground in screaming agony and drawing forth gouts of still more blood, the assault fueling itself as it killed. Behind the tendrils came an advancing block of enemy soldiers, all white and red, shining along the surface of their skin and uniforms with an iridescent light that made the hairs on my neck stand on end. And behind that formation, I could just barely see…  _ them. _

At first blush, they didn’t seem to be doing much, other than critically surveying the field and occasionally muttering something to themselves or making small, precise gestures with their hands. But there could be no doubt about what they were: the architects of the horrors that were currently transpiring on the battlefield, the enemy’s corpse wizards. Necromancers.

Somebody to my side called out an alarm, and even as I automatically turned my head to see, another explosion lit off, this one so close that the heat washed over my skin. I felt myself get lifted off my feet, felt myself slam sideways into a wall, and then felt nothing more as blackness rushed up to claim me.

- - -

_III:_ _I woke up alone on a battlefield full of corpses._

Consciousness returned slowly. At first I could only register the pain throbbing through my body, dully at first but becoming sharper as my senses reawakened. Next came the smell, forcing its way up my nostrils--unpleasantly metallic and meaty, plus traces of even more unsavory undertones. Last came the comprehension that everything had gone quiet, although this didn’t fully register until the silence was broken by a pair of boots moving slowly over the floor, pausing intermittently as their owner maneuvered around a corpse.

Had I my wits about me at the time, I would’ve lain still and waited for the unknown party to pass. As it was, I must have stirred at the sound, because the footsteps paused suddenly before making their way over to me. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said a voice from somewhere above me. “Still alive, kid?”

Slowly, tenderly, I rolled over onto my back, cracking my eyes open to see what appeared to be a woman gazing down at me. She had a hard, cold expression that darkened what would’ve otherwise been a strikingly beautiful face, and a mane of red hair that curled around her face and shoulders, perfunctorily brushed out of the way. My lips parted, and I croaked out a sound that was probably supposed to be something along the lines of “Who…?”

“Okay, easy there,” she said, seeing me twitch as though I were thinking of sitting up. Her hands reached down and carefully but firmly hauled me up to my feet, which sent a fresh wave of pain searing through my body. “You must’ve taken a pretty bad hit if you’ve been out for this long. We can get that looked at, but right now we need to get the hell out of here.”

I found myself with my arm across her shoulders, being pulled along as she helped to support my unsteady weight. “What… happened?” I managed to grate out between pained breaths.

“What do you  _ think  _ happened?” she shot back, her voice cold and angry. “The empire of the Nine Houses came in and steamrolled your little planet,  _ that’s _ what happened. I haven’t heard any fighting for the last little while, so I expect that right now they’re planting their flag and patting themselves on the back for their latest conquest.”

My stomach clenched. “That’s not… ‘s not…”

“Not  _ right? _ Not  _ fair? _ No, it sure as hell isn’t,” replied the woman. “What it is, is  _ incredibly fucked up.” _

We walked--staggered--in silence for a few moments. My mind was in free-fall. My thoughts kept drifting aimlessly between my home, my family, everybody I knew… all of them, now firmly under the heel of the empire of death. If they survived the transition. If they were even still alive right now.

The woman slapped an access panel, opening an exterior door and letting a breath of wind into our faces. The air stank of burnt rocket fuel and spent lives. Even the sunshine seemed just a little bit wrong--paler, weaker somehow, not as warm as it should’ve been. “What do I do now?” I asked, finding that my voice had returned.

I felt the woman’s shrug underneath my arm. “Go home,” she said. “Resign yourself. Scrape together whatever miserable excuse of a life you can underneath the new regime. Or…”

“...or what?”

She smiled, a cocky grin, but it wasn’t friendly; it was the sort of smile with a knife behind it.

“Come with me,” she said. “We can’t restore what they’ve taken from us, but we can sure as hell avenge it.”

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know that I have anything to add to this, really? I don't even know what possessed me to dwell on this aspect of the series' universe, save that I had a thought, and that thought turned into what you've just read. Hope everybody's staying safe and well.


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